Central Park is a man-made construction of 19th Century Landscape Design composed of a discrete number of introduced plants and a very large number of “wild” plants, animals, fungi, protozoans, algae, and bacteria.

Where is Central Park?

Latitude: 40 N

Longitude: 74 W

Altitude: 115 Feet

Why does knowing this matter?

Plants and animals live within defined

areas – north & south, east & west,

sea-level to mountainous…..

How big is Central Park, and how much land vs water ?

Central Park is about 850 acres, 200+ of which are water features.

Inland vs Sea-shore Environments

How far is Central Park from the sea? 12 miles

Why does this matter?

Many plants & animals live in saline

(salty) environments lacking in

Central Park.

What is the average Central Park soil pH – and why does it matter to know this?

Soil pH in Central Park is acidic, in places very acidic. It favors plants in families that thrive

in acidic soils, like the Ericaceae (Heath Family), which includes Rhododendron and Azalea,

The Environment as seen and used by those who came before us – the Coastal Lenape People…..

The Coastal Lenape had a foraging dominant economy…..Even when corn (maize) arrived, it was never a maize based economy. The seashore provided much of their nutrient needs, and greens, berries, and nuts were gathered. To hunt land animals, they used fire to clear the land. Over time, Manhattan Island was burned down over and over – and forests regenerated from buried seeds. It was a successful economy for a couple of thousand years – and ours today?

The Lenape lived mostly out of doors, but for protection from inclement weather and to rest during the night, they built wigwams and long-house shelters. [“Mannahatta” by Eric Sanderson]

The scholar of the Lenape, Herbert Kraft, wrote that, like many people who live close to the land, they ‘saw themselves as an integral park of a natural world filled with an almost infinite variety of plants, animals, insects, clouds and stones, each of which possessed spirits no less important than those of human beings.’ [quoted in “Mannahatta”]

Heschel knew that there was something very wrong with the way human beings were living in the modern world. In 1951, in his book on the Sabbath, he wrote that our war with nature had come to resemble a defeat: “We have fallen victims to the work of our hands; it is as if the forces we had conquered have conquered us.” (The Sabbath, p. 27) Yet he says that Judaism doesn’t teach us to reject civilization, but to surpass it by attaining some degree of independence from it. “The Sabbath is the day on which we learn the art of surpassing civilization.”

In 1955, eight years before Rachel Carson’s book appeared, Heschel wrote the following deeply prophetic words: “As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines. Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind. Humankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation.” (God in Search of Man, p. 46) This then would, I believe, be Heschel’s way of understanding what is at the root of the environmental crisis: the eclipse of wonder, awe and appreciation, and its replacement by mindlessness, greed and domination.